Providers of international VoIP services are beginning to provide in country support for local calling features of foreign countries. This requires the network providers to know the characteristics of local dialing plans and features such as emergency dialing numbers for hundreds of locales for the supported foreign countries. For instance, in the foreign city, such as Hong Kong of China, the local dialing plan uses 8 digit phone numbers and the emergency service phone number is 999. The local dialing plans and the local emergency phone numbers vary from country to country or even from city to city within a country.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for providing in country phone numbers and routing rules in a common database in a packet network, e.g., a VoIP network.